When we are not spoken of as inhabitants of the polar regions we are described as French. Now, the inhabitants of Quebec have always contended that they are the Canadians, and what the rest of us, the great majority, are I can scarcely make out.
Once I was in an office in Broadway, New York, and happened to state that I was a Canadian. The Yankee manager of that office remarked “that he as yet hardly knew how to classify Canadians--whether as Englishmen or Americans--and, in fact, that the world had not yet made up its mind what we were.” If we were all French (and I am not for a moment speaking disparagingly of our _habitants_), we could then be easily classified. But to be called “only a colonist” in Europe, and in New York neither an Englishman nor an American, makes one’s position as a genuine Canadian a little foggy. The effort to distinguish by the spelling “Canadians” for the English-speaking, and “_Canadiens_” for the French-speaking, is all very well, and will no doubt work well enough at home. But abroad the average Englishman, if you spell Canadian with an “e,” will simply put you down as an ignorant fellow and a poor speller. And now can you wonder what the people of continental Europe will think of us, if they think of us at all, as apart from the United States? The plain truth of the case is that we are far too modest, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, and do not “blow” enough about our own country to cause it to be better known abroad. The great west of the United States was surely made and settled by the Yankee “blowing.” Their papers are ever full of “spread eagle,” and always telling about their boundless country, always praising their own institutions, and pulling down those of the “oppressed monarchy of Great Britain,” and always representing their country as the earthly paradise.
Dr. Lyman Abbott, in the course of a visit to Ontario, frankly admitted--privately, of course--that our free school system, and likewise its management, were superior to those of the American States. Then let us wake up, and since it seems to be absolutely necessary to “blow” about ourselves, let us copy the apt example of the Yankees and do it--and do it so strongly as to make up for past deficiencies.